[Tim Murphy]

I have now carefully read through Yesterday, or Long Ago, and I cannot commend it highly enough to our members. Understand this is Wiley Clements, and you will be stepping back into a sequence of lyrics which celebrate traditional values, redolant at times of magnolias, poems which employ inversion and the subjunctive with equal ease. You will be struck by how many of these verses were workshopped rather recently at the Deep End. Like David Anthony or Oliver Murray, Wiley has plunged back into verse after a long hiatus. The winged chariot is hurrying nearer Wiley than those young (!) poets. I occasionally have the sense that some of the newest poems were committed to flesh out this large book with undue haste. But 35 years his junior, I have world enough and time. The overwhelming sense of the book, though, reflects Dick Davis' comment on Cavafy at Alicia's Cavafyesque thread at Mastery, where Dick talks about the sweetest poetic sensibility among modern masters. Wiley's book can be infinitely hard-nosed, but it evokes with heart-rending accuracy a civility whose passing he laments in the high, elegiac fashion this lifelong student of poetry has made his own.